


take a spin

by Missy



Category: Scarlet's Walk - Tori Amos (Album)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Cheating, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Music, Pre-Canon, Road Trips, Yuletide Madness 2015, Yuletide Treat, porn industry, sex industry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:28:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5525360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Scarlet began her journey of a thousand miles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take a spin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



> Please beware that this story contains **Suicidal behavior** , **Cheating** and **The suicide of a supporting character**.

“Hey honey. Wanna have a little extra money? Y’know, you could be famous. If I light you up just right.”

That’s how it starts – the easy promise of cash, the loose-lipped grins and the come-on. Scarlet is poor, Jack’s doing nothing to help her pay the bills, and even though it’s the dirty-doggest thing she thinks she’s finally found a way out of the mess.

The business card is small and pink and cuts her thumb when she takes it.

*** 

The first shoot involves a black wig, two guys and a leather harness. She keeps screwing up her lines, keeps laughing, which stops when her mouth is otherwise occupied.

*** 

She brings home the bacon. Jack’s thrilled with her, suddenly, and they get to move to Pomona and have a little white house with a crushed coral path and little pink Mustang. She tells herself she’s happy, because he’s happy, and because she knows what it’s like to go to bed on an empty stomach.

 

***

 

Crazy calls from Carolina on her birthday. He’s there on a four-week furlough and he wants her to know he’s proud of her. For some reason. Scarlet never tried to figure out Crazy’s methods. But he sends her birds of paradise and clitoral peas and a huge arrangement of ladyslippers and she takes it as some kind of sign that she’s doing it right.

 

*** 

The AVNS are good to her. For some reason. She puts the trophies on her marble mantle and drinks wine alone by the fire while Jack runs around making a fool of her in public. 

She’s the most boring porn star in the whole wide world, and she’s kind of amused by that fact. 

*** 

Amber is only nineteen when they first meet, and she’s scrawny and scared when Scarlet sees her milling around the set for the first time in her robe. She plays mommy; she plays psychiatrist. They have fun some of the time, she’s certain, absolutely, she’ll stay when she asks her. She tries to throw the girl a lifeline but she’s already dissolving, disappearing under the black-gold waves that scream her name.

 

*** 

 

“I’m dying,” the note says – the internet says the note says, because Scarlet can’t beg herself to read the obituaries and instead dips her toes carefully into the light-minded gossip column. “I can’t even help me. You’ll have to save yourselves, girls.”

 

***

 

She comes home from Amber’s funeral to find Jack in bed with Lily. The cops come. Things are damaged, not that she’s ever given a damn about things….well, many things. She tells him to get the fuck out of and stay the fuck out of her life forever, and if he touches her niece again she’ll kill him. Lily – because she’s barely twenty-two, ridiculous and emboldened by the belief that she knows everything – screams at Jack to wait for her, tells him that she loves him. Scarlet barely holds back her bile; she tells the girl never to speak to her again, ignoring the ranting and railing Lily does to her turned, blind back.

She starts planning from that night on. Barely gets in enough sleep to fuel her plans for the next day, but the idea has taken seed, started germinating, almost beyond her will and way of controlling it.

 

*** 

She packs all of her memorabilia – her “porn stuff” into two leopard print suitcases. She throws them into the Bay, along with her six-inch pumps and her hairspray, before climbing back behind the wheel.

Her destinations’ unknown from this point forward, and to be honest that’s kind of thrilling and scary at the same time. But she wants it like she wants her next breath, so she will – she’ll make her pulse react, make herself thrill to it, and when her heart beat its wild tattoo, wants it like she wants to feel what real love is like, and the sand under her feet, and the sound of her own laughter breaking in the air. 

She’s keeping the Mustang, though. That car’s the one thing they can’t take away from her.

 

*** 

She’s six miles off the Gulf Coast Highway before she starts singing again. And once the words pour from her broken throat they don’t stop, not for anything, the hot desert wind or the cruel ocean breeze.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic draws from a lot of different songs on SW. "Amber Waves" sort of drew me in the direction of a pornstar AU (which, if you read between the lines of the song, doesn't seem too far off from the album's "canon"); Amber's getting "lit up like the amber waves in someone's movie show" (Like the other Amber Waves from Boogie Nights) and Scarlet's loss of her seems to drive her impulse to leave most strongly. The lousy relationship Scarlet endures took root after listening to "Don't Make Me Come to Vegas". Crazy from "Crazy" puts in a cameo appearance. Hope you liked this, and you have a happy Yuletide!


End file.
